Carrying on ...

I think a mission emerges from this process if it's pursued long enough. It's like a mission is just your later-stage life's purpose. You might never find a mission, but the author describes the best way to find it even if he implies mission and purpose don't always intersect. If one makes meaning and deploys virtue long enough, it will eventually lead them to powerful, undiscovered levers (in some N-dimensional meaning-virtue space) and their mission becomes pulling them.

I suspect this is true even if the person doesn't have a Thing, because not having a Thing is a Thing, and it leads them somewhere in meaning-virtue space, somewhere more exotic than where people with a Thing end up (the magnitude of their vector may be smaller, but it's dense where vectors of recognizable Things are sparse). Maybe it's harder to find big levers wherever non-Thing people end up, but I imagine, naively, in this hallucination I'm having, they'd have a talent in pulling a symphony of small levers where Thing-people are stuck yanking on a stubborn few.

I'm a Thing-person so I'll never compose a lever-pulling orchestra, but if I were a non-Thing person I suspect that'd be my mission, whatever that practically looks like, assuming I wanted a mission.